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To deal with all the people guillotined during the French Revolution, the government allowed for their bodies to be skinned and for that skin to be tanned and made into various things like boots, pants, and jackets. It was said that a man's skin was preferred for fashion because a woman's was too soft to be useful.

Also, in 1972, a book titled El Viaje Largo by Tere Medina was bound in human skin.

The Bobbit Worm is a predatory worm that lives in corals. They can grow up to 10 feet long and their jaws can chew through coral.

They come from eggs which can be dormant in corals you buy for fishtanks and such. They are next to invincible and on top of strong jaws that can slice a femur in half, they are covered in venomous spines.

So literally out of nowhere these things can appear in your saltwater fishtank and it's virtually impossible to kill them and they will chew tunnels through all your coral and slice your fish in half. Not to mention they're polychaetes so if you do somehow manage to slice the head off it or something it will just grow a new head and the head will grow a new body and they'll mate and make more worms.

I swear, if the final fact had been "They can eat through glass and will come into your house and eat your leftovers and rape your wife" I wouldn't have been surprised. It's already far more powerful than I feel comfortable with.

Similarly, if you damage one of your eyes and it isn't removed and stays in your eye socket your body will make antibodies against it, which will end up attacking and destroying your good eye. (source: EM doctor)

I know that it's one step removed, but a lot of folks around where I live stopped eating seafood after the big tsunami, reason being that the crabs and such probably gorged themselves on the bodies of people that were washed out to sea.

As a commercial fishing captain my step dad wouldn't eat crabs for years. They had found a human corpse floating in it's rain gear and when they pulled it up instead of a face in the hood opening it was a mass of blue crabs.

Crevasses are V shaped, so if you fall in it most likely wont kill you. You will get stuck and your body heat will slowly start melting the ice causing you to slip further down the crevasse, until you will no longer be able to expand your chest in order to breathe.

sand does this too. people have died with their heads uncovered because people thought they'd be fine as long as they could breathe...nope

edit: it's not that people get sucked under it's that as you breathe in, fine sand grains fill up the newly created space, inhibiting your ability to breathe out again. Your breaths become more and more shallow until you die (not sure what term is correct--suffocate? asphyxiate?). anyway yea, be careful with putting people in holes int he sand.

edit2: I guess originally I didn't mean they could breathe, I meant as long as they had their head out of the sand

There are more bacteria and assorted "non-human" cells inside your body, than there are cells carrying your DNA. And when you die, they don't die; just the opposite. After they lower you into the ground, for months your body can look forward to being more "alive" than ever.

The body of David Sharp still sits in a cave at the top of Mount Everest. David attempted the climb in 2005 and near the top, stopped in this cave to rest. His body eventually froze in place rendering him unable to move. Over 30 climbers passed by him as he sat freezing to death. Some heard faint moans and realized he was still alive. They stopped and spoke with him. He was able to identify himself but was unable to move. Brave climbers moved him into the Sun in an attempt to thaw him but eventually, realizing David would be unable to move, were forced to leave him to die. His body still sits in the cave and is used as a guide point for other climbers nearing the summit.

I'm not sure if I'm super creeped out by that, or if I would actually be somewhat honored if I could be remembered in death as a wayshrine to others 0.o

I actually got similar advice at my first job. We had a walk in extra cold freezer that would sometimes get a frost build up in the seal making it hard to open the door. I was told by the guy training me,

If you ever get locked in, make sure you strike a really cool pose to die in. That way at least when they find you you'll look like you were a badass to the bitter end.

Before a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it liquifies in its cocoon using juices that are similar to what it uses to digest its food while it's a caterpillar. So to put it another way, a caterpillar digests its body from the inside out until its just a pile of caterpillar vomit in its cocoon. Then it transforms into one of the most beautiful insects in the world.

The Challenger space shuttle crew compartment did not explode when the rocket carrying it did. It traveled on (and upwards, for awhile) with at least some of the crew possibly--I think probably, and NASA found that too distasteful and horrifying to release, but that's my opinion--alive until it finally fell into the water far out in the ocean at around 200 miles per hour, killing everyone inside instantly (if they weren't already dead).

Technically, Challenger, and its external tank, never "exploded". When the SRB broke free, it slammed into the external tank, causing it to fall apart. The aerodynamic forces tore the external tank and, by extention, the orbiter apart. There was no true explosion- the fireball was just that, fire, a conflagration (not a detonation) caused by the propellants mixing with each other and igniting.

The orbiter broke up into pieces, but the crew cabin stayed mostly intact. The very tip of the nose and the cargo bay broke free of it. There is some evidence to suggest that some of the crew were alive when they hit the ground.

Although the exact timing of the death of the crew is unknown, several crew members are known to have survived the initial breakup of the spacecraft. However, the shuttle had no escape system and the impact of the crew compartment with the ocean surface was too violent to be survivable.

three of the four recovered Personal Egress Air Packs (PEAPs) on the flight deck were found to have been activated. Investigators found their remaining unused air supply roughly consistent with the expected consumption during the 2 minute 45 second post-breakup trajectory - wikipedia

Meaning - at least three of them were alive the whole time from the breakup until the crash. I can't imagine being in their position.

When you buy a deadbolt set at a hardware store, there are only so many different lock configurations. Usually 4-5 for cheaper sets. I found this out when shopping for a 4 pack, which I couldn't find, and then asking an associate. He pointed out that I just had to find 2x 2 packs with the same code on the front. When I asked "So you are saying that 1-5 people who buy these will have keys to my house?" He said "Well yeah but they would have to try every door with those locks" All I could think about was the fact someone could buy these lock sets and find any door with those locks and just try the key from each code until one worked. Still creeped about it.

Or, OR, they could just go to any house and bump-key it, which is ridiculously easy and fast. EVEN TODAY most locks are vulnerable to this hack, especially in apartment buildings (where the owner chose your lock and really doesn't give a damn if it's vulnerable to lockpicking or not).

They can use you as a real crash test dummy and apparently there is a lack of infant cadavers for this research (I can't imagine why)

They can cut your head off and use it in refresher courses for plastic surgeons (Nose job, anyone?)

They can leave you in a field and study how your body decomposes under different conditions (Face-up naked vs. in the trunk of a car, for instance)

Edit: Donating your body to science is a great cause, these are just some random creepy facts
Edit: A lot of ppl are asking, I learned this from the book "Stiff: The Curious Lives Of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach

Botflies. The larva burrow into live mammals until they're ready for their next life stage. The species of botfly that attacks humans lives for 8-12 weeks... during which you can feel and see the larva moving under your skin and eating your flesh, occasionally sticking a little tube out from the wound in order to breathe...

Funny little tidbit. Microsoft had/has a filter on their XBOX live name system so when you try to create an XBOX live handle containing the word "ass" it would automatically change it to butt. So when someone tried using the name assassinator it would be automatically changed by Microsoft to buttbuttinator.

Toxoplasmosis. It makes mice attracted to cat pee so that the toxoplasmosis can get into the cats to mate and multiply because it can only do so in cats. It basically makes the mice commit suicide or generally become much more reckless by altering their brains. And that stuff can get into us as well when we, for instance, clean out a litter box, which is one of the reasons why pregnant women shouldn't handle litter boxes. And apparently when it gets in us it alters our personalities enough that we're more likely to get into car accidents. And, to top that off, more than half the population has it.

Just think, there's a parasite in you probably that has altered your personality in some way. You probably aren't who you think you are.

There's a species called Bdelloidea, in the phylum Rotifera, that reproduces entirely by parthenogenesis (form of asexual reproduction in which growth and development of embryos occur without fertilization), this leads to the entire population being female. The females can then self fertilize while still developing in the mother, so mom essentially gives birth to an already pregnant baby.
The babies within babies thing was explained by my Invertebrate Zoology professor.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bdelloidea

There are 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion) microorganisms in your gut. That's 10x more than the number of cells in your entire body. You are essentially a big bag of mostly water that exists for the cultivation of microorganisms, a giant Petri dish with attitude.

We're a big bag of mostly water that exists in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with trillions of smaller water bags. You make it sound like they're parasites and we're just jackasses carrying them around. A lot of them couldn't survive without us, and we couldn't survive without them.

Ted Kaczynski (mathematics professor turned antisocial manifesto-writing survivalist/ serial killer "Unabomber") was probably subjected to psychologically damaging experimentation in the CIA project MKULTRA as a student, which may have contributed to his maiming and killing of dozens of people, stating in one case that a victim's business was "the development of techniques for manipulating people's attitudes"--the very goal of MKULTRA. I hate conspiracy theories, but on this one, signs point to yes.

To my knowledge, the CIA wasn't involved. As a Harvard undergrad, Ted volunteered for a psych experiment where he thought he would debate another undergrad but it was instead an expert, so he was set-up to fail. A debate shouldn't trigger a meltdown--though it was a violation of psych-ethics. Granted he was young, but I never got how that was as bad as LSD-dosing.

People who experience disturbing hallucinations may be driven to self-enucleation as a last resort to rid themselves of their nightmarish visions. Unfortunately, because these hallucinations are created by the mind, eye-gouging does not remedy them. Most resort to suicide after this.

Think about what it must be like to live in a nightmare for most of your life. Think about your worst fears and never being able to close your eyes. Every waking and slumbering moment being invaded by horrors and never being able to look away. Being driven to the point where you'd try to remove your own eyes just to feel a moment of relief.

And finally realizing the only way out is to end your life so that you may finally have peace.

I understood it less of "every cubone" and more of a legend of origin. Like that African legend that explains the reason the cheetah "tear stained" markings on her face is because she cried for so long after her cubs were eaten by a hyena that all cheetahs are now born with those markings now.

It is called the Lonely Pokémon because of its tendency to keep to itself and avoid sociality. It was apparently traumatized by the death of its mother, and has now entirely removed itself from society. Cubone will often weep at night in mourning of its mother. When Cubone cries, the skull that it wears on its head vibrates and emits “a plaintive and mournful sound.” On the night of a full moon, the cries are said to be especially terrible. Cubone seems to recognize its mother in the moon, and so it howls with a particular sadness.